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Monday, November 22, 2010

Not your debt - don't pay it



Anglo Irish Bank's debt is not your debt.

You didn't borrow billions from Roman Abramovich and European banks. You didn't lend it foolishly to speculative property developers who went belly-up. So why are you expected to pay off the billionaires?

Print this up and stick it in your window. Stick it on your car. Stick it across Bertie Ahern's tax-dodging gob. Stick it all over the place until they get the message.

It's not your debt or mine. Let's refuse to pay it.

(Thanks to Esker Riada for the image.)

Sunday, November 21, 2010

The death of the Irish Republic


Well, the traitors have managed to achieve the death of the Irish Republic tonight.

It was done without a shot fired in anger. Perhaps some shots should be fired in anger. After all, so many people have died on this island for so much less.

The world is talking about Ireland being 'bailed out.' I took a call from an elderly relative tonight, joking about tapping me for a loan, since Ireland is obviously now swimming in EU and IMF euros.

The world, and more importantly the Irish victims, clearly have no idea what is really going on. It's quite simple, quite dastardly and quite horrific.

Two Irish banks, run and operated by corrupt bankers, borrowed billions from European banks and billionaires like Roman Abramovich and lent the money out to property developers in Ireland and elsewhere.

Those property developers fuelled a property bubble, assisted by their pet politicians in Fianna Fail, and are now largely going bankrupt, with only unfinished houses to offer in repayment of their loans.

So the Irish banks have no money coming in from the developers. And their big depositors are worried about their viability, so they have taken their money in recent weeks and shifted it elsewhere. Now the Irish banks have next to nothing to pay off the billionaires with.

Except a foolish government guarantee, provided by the Fianna Fail crooks who have long been the developers' proxies in power. That irrational, illegal guarantee holds that the Irish taxpayer will repay any debt owed by these corrupt banks.

The billionaires want their billions back. They gambled and they lost, on a speculative market. But when you're hyperrich, you don't ever lose. You just change the game until you win again. And that's what they have done. The bank's bondholders pressurised Ireland and Europe to ensure that those debts would be repaid.

At the end of the line is the Irish taxpayer, who has received nothing tonight. Rather, the Irish taxpayer now owes 80 billion euro that they didn't owe before. That money will come from Europe to Ireland and be owed by Ireland to Europe. But Ireland won't see a penny of it.

Instead, it will go to the banks who will give it back to the billionaires.

And we will be paying off those debts for the next two decades.

This, in short, is corporate welfare gone mad. It is treason, conducted by the government on the people of Ireland for the benefit of foreign billionaires. A side-effect is that the country will now effectively be run by Brussels. The Euro-state begins here.

So for anyone languishing under the delusion that Ireland received anything tonight, let's be clear, all Ireland got was a debt that it didn't accrue. All Ireland got was the blame for bankers' mistakes. All Ireland got was the removal of its sovereignty.

It's a times like these that I get nostalgic for the paramilitaries that plagued my youth in Northern Ireland. If ever there was need of them, it is now.

Listen to how a nation dies today:

Monday, November 08, 2010

My new book

I sent off my new book to some publishers the other day.

It's a true story, set in Ireland, of a Mad Max-type post-apocalyptic scenario where people fistfight for mouldy potatoes and sell their daughters for a litre of petrol.

Unfortunately, I've had to call it fiction because it's set in 2011 and that hasn't happened yet. I prefer to call it 'future factual' because by the time it's published, if it's published, it'll have already happened.

That's due to the delay in bringing books to market, largely due to the welter of Jordan autobiographies already in the system.

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

The good, the bad and the ugly

What's good about the US elections tonight? None of the multi-millionaire big spenders managed to buy themselves political power. The kerrazzee wrestling CEO didn't manage it, nor did the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who exported jobs out of America, nor the eBay CEO.

It seems that the day and hour when you can simply purchase power is not today and not this hour. Not yet. Thank goodness for that. It's a small mercy.

The bad? Stalemate in US politics for the next two years. Looks like a Democratic Senate and a Republican House. But the Republicans are riven between the GOP old guard and the Tea Party, which is itself riven between the likes of Marco Rubio and the likes of Christine 'not a witch' O'Donnell.

The tea partiers want smaller government, but they don't know what to cut except Obama's healthcare programme, his one achievement which he won't give up. The GOP wing, as demonstrated by Bush, are as big spending as the Democrats. And the Democrats have just been viciously pasted.

The ugly? Proposition 19 seems to have been voted down in California. This was the proposal to legalise and tax cannabis in the state. It would have brought billions in revenue to the bankrupt state. And it would have set in process a much-needed wave of legalisation across the world had it passed and been demonstrated to work.

The war on drugs has failed utterly. Cannabis is one of the most benign of psychoactive substances, rated only this week by prominent medical journal The Lancet as much less damaging to individuals or society than alcohol.

America's demand for drugs won't recede just because cannabis remains illegal. People will continue to die by the thousand in Mexico and elsewhere to feed that appetite. And the civil liberty to choose freely a favoured intoxicant has again been denied.

According to exit polls, the vote broken down by age was as follows: 18-29 59%, 30-44 50%, 45-64 44, 65+ 32.

So it was voted down by grannies. Boomers are slightly opposed (what utter hypocrisy) and younger voters (under 45) are in favour. It's inevitable that cannabis will be legalised in California, then America, then the rest of the world, in future years. But during each of those years, criminals will pocket billions and thousands will die as a result of this ludicrous prohibition.

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

All that glitters

It's US mid-term election night.

The exit polls are predicting a hammering for the Democrats. That should mean good news for the dollar and bad news for precious metals on the markets.

After all, the perception is that the Obama socialists (US perception, not mine) are flagrant tax-and-spenders, while Republicans are fiscal scrooges.

But of course, these aren't ordinary Republicans. These are people who have to issue ads telling the electorate that they aren't witches. These are ill-educated, small government looneys who have, with the support of frothing-mouthed cheerleaders at Fox News, successfully eaten up the GOP.

The markets like Republicans. But they don't like looneys. They probably like Obama better than they like looneys. (After all, he did bail out Wall Street.)

That fact, coupled with the inevitability of Ben Bernanke's great dollar printing machine going back into overdrive tomorrow, is driving the dollar back down and precious metals up.

Today, the Aussie dollar smashed through parity with the greenback. Expect the Swiss franc and the Canuck dollar to do likewise shortly.

What does this all mean for Ireland? Well, firstly, we're still screwed. The Germans are keeping the euro high in the ongoing currency war, meaning we're buggered on exports outside of the EU (ie to two of our nearest and biggest trading partners, Britain and America, who are both printing money like it was going out of fashion.)

Secondly, a bunch of Tea Party nutjobs won't look outside their narrow national interests. There will be more rabble-rousing about illegal immigrants, and more demands to repatriate jobs back to America. Either President Hopey Changey concedes to some of this rhetoric or he kisses a second term goodbye over two years of lame duck administrating.

The gelding of the Obama administration in conjunction with the destruction of the GOP by Tea Party malignants is not and cannot be good news for us.

Right now, Ireland is so far gone that we need a white knight to save us, and the Germans won't play ball, and the Americans are taking off their armour and hiding in a cave. And for all the Fianna Fail rhetoric and ass-kissing in Beijing, I wouldn't expect any help from the Chinese.

After all, they made their money playing a rigged currency game for the past few years, leading to the current beggar-thy-neighbour currency wars.

In 24 hours, America will look inward. It will look bankrupt. And it will look stupid.

And our Uncle Sam won't be playing sugar Daddy to Ireland possibly ever again.